Step One -- powerless, unmanageable

[Neagrm]

1. We admitted we were powerless over food [addiction] -that our lives had become unmanageable.


I hope you don't mind if I think out loud by writing here. I don't know what I'll end up saying, but would like to explore this. By trying to verbalize some thoughts, maybe I'll sort some things out and gain more clarity thereby taking baby steps forward.

I wonder if I use the analogy of a different chronic condition I have, Crohn's disease (CD, a serious form of Inflamatory Bowel Disease, IBD), it might help give me perspective. The first part of Step One ... admitted I was powerless ... Well, in effect that's what I had to do when I was first diagnosed with the incurable illness of CD many years ago.

It wasn't until I physically collapsed from total weakness and severe dehydration (after what I thought was stomach flu that just wouldn't get better), that I began to get the medical help I needed.

I was relatively young at the time and busy with job, marriage, children. It was just the flu and would get better ... so I thought. It wasn't until I fell almost unconscious to the bathroom floor one night, after the umpteenth bout of severe abdominal pain and diarrhea, that I was forced to acknowledge I was powerless over my body.

Unable to call out loud enough, I was barely able to drag myself across the little hallway to wake my husband and tell him -- I need medical intervention now or I'm going to die.

After two weeks in the hospital, following much misery and several tests, I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease and began the recommended treatment. I'd never heard of it before and they said it was incurable. I was as powerless over it as I'd never been powerless before. Suddenly this huge thing controlled my existence and all my decisions and it felt overwhelming.

The first step to getting better was to accept that I had the condition; accept the reality of it. To begin healing I had to recognize I had this problem.

My relationship with food (OS) reminds me somewhat of that; I am powerless over my addiction in that it seems like food is in control of me. This is partly what step one means to me -- I acknowledge, with eyes wide open, that I have this problem with food. Once I do that and admit it's "unmanageable", that is the first step of healing.

Whew! sorry so long-winded, enough for now...